Thanks for the response Anthony.
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Yes, just to be clear, I was not suggesting that two different people experience something radically different when they look at an object. Simply that such subtle differences do exist. And whilst they probably mean very, very little in terms of every day objects, perhaps they do play a role in portrait painting. Because a mother might be heavily invested in her child, more so than an artistic stranger, this might explain why often people are disappointed with portraits of their loved ones.
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In terms of my example of a mother having a trauma that is triggered by the colour blue: clearly here the colour blue – which I chose just to keep things simple – is rather stupid, in that the colour blue is ubiquitous. Perhaps I should have said something like: suppose the mother was abused by someone who listened to Elvis. And that the artist arbitrarily painted a copy of an Elvis record in the background of the painting.
Again, to be clear, the point I was making was not that these things often happen, or even sometimes happen, but that if you take our understanding of vision to the limit they could be possible.
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Yes, you are correct I meant to say that that the brain is primed to see something different due to bias. Rather than what I stated which was that the eye is biased.
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I hope your well too. And yes I have done some pieces lately that I have been very proud of, though I wouldn’t quite call them masterpieces!
Actually, I’ve also been doing some research on evolution. Are you aware that Neo-Darwinism is probably on its last knees and is about to fall? I’m sure you might have heard about something like epigenetics. The thing is, is that the vision science that you propound seems very much in line with this more holistic epigenetic approach. For example this comment:
‘vision works by having patterns of light on the retina trigger reflex patterns of neural activity that have been shaped entirely by the past consequences of visually guided behavior over EVOLUTIONARY and individual life time’
is very much in keeping with the epigenetics philosophy. That said, it will be interesting to see how new theories of evolution might impact our thinking of both biology and psychology, and whether or not certain Neo-Darwinian implications will still hold true (though I think in a lot of cases they will).